At a glance
- The sponsor itself carries more than $16 billion in assets under management.
- The fund owns roughly 89 percent of 386 Wabasha St. North, a 16-story downtown St. Paul office building in a qualified opportunity zone census tract, with the remaining 11 percent held outside the vehicle.
- The St. Paul project is the sixth completed between Inland and Kaeding, four of them ground-up or adaptive-reuse, and that repeat pairing is doing the fundraising work.
Inland Real Estate Investment Corp. has closed Office Conversion Opportunity Zone at $28 million, fully subscribed, a private vehicle structured to qualify as a qualified opportunity fund and sponsored by an Inland Investments affiliate. The sponsor itself carries more than $16 billion in assets under management.
The fund owns roughly 89 percent of 386 Wabasha St. North, a 16-story downtown St. Paul office building in a qualified opportunity zone census tract, with the remaining 11 percent held outside the vehicle. The plan is to redevelop the underutilized tower into The Stella—178 apartments and about 2,338 square feet of street-level retail—with Kaeding Development Group as development partner, Ron Clark Construction & Design as general contractor, and Bader Management as property manager.
The St. Paul project is the sixth completed between Inland and Kaeding, four of them ground-up or adaptive-reuse, and that repeat pairing is doing the fundraising work. A fully subscribed QOZ fund is less an endorsement of tax deferral than an underwriting of execution: repeat developer, named contractor, property manager already in place. That specificity is what gets a QOZ fund filled before the first unit comes out of the ground.
The project also drops 178 lease-up units into the multifamily segment this publication has argued is next in line for repricing, making the fund effectively a bet that a converted office tower can rent up through that repricing. The tax deferral is fixed at the close; what remains variable is whether leases support the conversion economics, and because the building already exists, the schedule turns on construction and lease-up rather than entitlement.
The $28 million matters less than the structure that filled it. The same developer-contractor-property manager template now has to fill the building. For sponsors running similar conversions, the playbook is plain: name the contractor and the property manager before you market the fund, because investors are pricing execution risk into the opportunity-zone wrapper.
Reported by the Fundraising desk from IREI. Published . Updated Aug 21, 2026 · 3:00 p.m. ET. Corrections